'Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds' Barnett Newman

Aesthetics

June 09, 2014

The main focus of this week’s session of 6 Ways of Thinking About Art (Tate Modern course, ticket only, sold out) was the tension between treating works of art as catalysts for subjective musing and the idea that they might (or should, to be any good) have definite objective meanings. These may not be mutually exclusive angles to take on art.

The Eighteenth Century philosopher David Hume, in his short essay 'Of the Standard of Taste' recounts the story of two wine tasters one of whom declares that the wine he is drinking tastes leathery; the other says it tastes metallic. When they get to the bottom of the barrel they find an old key with a leather thong, so they were both correct about objective aspects of the wine. We'd like to be able to anchor our interpretations and understandings of art in similarly firm objective ways, but this is impossible for a discussion of David Hume's responses to the idea that our assessment of works of art simply comes down to individual taste listen to this podcast interview with Mike Martin)

A key question is the degree to which works of art are like Rorschach inkblots: stimuli for projective interpretation, where autobiography, mood, and mental set of the viewer play a substantial role and the viewer projects his or her own feelings on to the works (NB Andy Warhol's 'Rorschach paintings' were based on a mistaken view of how Rorshach used inkblots - read about them here). Whilst it is naive to believe it possible to enter a gallery with an innocent eye, the mind cleansed of all associations and expectations, and plausible to think that seeing is, as the philosopher of science N.R. Hanson put it, 'a theory-laden activity' ('There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball' and our mental set, the expectations and knowledge we have affect what we see), there are still limits to interpretation. We can't see absolutely whatever we want to see - our interpretations are based on something out there even if they are idiosyncratic or whimsical. Nevertheless, context and expectation have a significant role to play, as they do in most aspects of our life (read this interesting discussion of the psychology of why we like what we like)

Many appreciators of the visual arts are content that particular works of art should simply stimulate a range of interesting responses, and believe that art should be open-ended. It is an orthodoxy amongst views of contemporary art that didactic art tends to be bad art - it is in ambiguity and the possibility of generating new interpretations that art's value lies. In contrast to this view, Alain de Botton has recently asserted in his book Religion for Atheists, that good art can and should be didactic, that it should teach us through sensuous beautiful creations, to be good and wise.

You can listen to a short audio interview I made with Alain de Botton which includes a discussion of his view of art here.

In the gallery we looked at works on Level 4 West 'Structure and Clarity', particularly miminimalist and abstract works. The idea of focussing on these often austere works was they at first seem resistant to personal interpretations. These included

This last work is a large open-topped box made of copper and painted with a red cadmium bottom that is reflected in the internal sides of the piece. Judd’s work is declared to be about the material objects themselves, and is expressly not meant to evoke personal reflections (certainly that is the impression given by the captioning in Tate Modern: Judd’s art is not about representation or metaphor or suggestion, but rather presents the formed material objects themselves).

Yet the photographer Thomas Demand’s written reaction to the work in an extended caption is deliberately personal and subjective, describing the images the work evokes for him, well aware that this was not the sort of response that Judd would have hoped for... It is interesting in the context of an art gallery to have a contemporary artist legitimizing a highly personal, associative, and to some degree projective response to a work of art, one that goes against the known intentions of the artist.

Next week: Art as Form...(in particular we will be considering Clive Bell's approach to art).

November 12, 2013

For the 4th session of Playing with Meaning we re-visited the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern, exploring the possibility of describing the works entirely in musical terms. Klee was himself a talented violinist, and his parents and wife were all musicians. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke even wrote this of him:

Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music."

So the idea that music was an influence on Klee, in various ways, has historical backing. The point of the excercise was in part to explore the idea of aspect seeing - the notion that the same physical object can be seen in very different ways depending on our mental set. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously used the Duck-Rabbit picture to illustrate this (for illustrations of duck-rabbits see 9 examples of the duck-rabbit, also this article about the claim to have found the oldest pictorial illusion). Wittgenstein's discussion is in Part ll of Philosophical Investigations. The sudden awareness of the previously unseen animal in the picture is an example of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning of an aspect’. The visual stimulus doesn’t change. The retinal image that we have is presumably also unchanged. Yet we suddenly see what we thought was just a duck as a rabbit. This example emphasises the degree to which seeing is linked with expectation and concepts and is far from the passive reception of incoming visual data that some early empiricists believed it to be (Hans-Johann Glock in his A Wittgenstein Dictionary p.37 calls this ‘concept-saturatedness of perception’).

The exercise worked well, and resulted in different sorts of attention - we found visual analogues for rhythm, tone, scales, accent, key, echo, modulation, musical genre, and much more in Klee's work, and generally we spent more time discussing non-representational aspects of pictures than we might otherwise have done. It was also fun.

November 11, 2013

For session three of Playing with Meaning we further explored some of Arthur Danto's ideas about what art is. In particular we considered his notion that art is about something - contrasting this aspect of his account with George Dickie's Institutional Theory of Art which, in its simplest form stated that a work of art is an artifact some aspects of which have had the status 'candidate for appreciation' conferred upon it. Danto's approach is often confused with Dickie's, but he always distanced himself from the way Dickie approached this question. Dickie was only interested in the term 'art' used in a purely descriptive way (i.e. without implying any evaluation whatsover). Unlike Danto, he had no stipulation that a work of art needed to have a subject whatsoever.

In the Tate Modern galleries we discussed several works which quite clearly had subject matter. For example, Hrair Sarkissian's 'Execution Squares' 2008, described here, large scale photographs of empty squares in Syria where executions have taken place, clearly are about something. Interestingly, despite being photgraphs, the subject matter is as much what is not in front of the lens, as it is what actually is there. We discussed these images as examples of the way in which, as Jean-Paul Sartre noticed, our consciousness of things isn't straightforwardly of what we see - in Sartre's example he goes to a café to meet Pierre, but Pierre isn't there - his entire experience of the café is of absence, of concrete nothingness.... We interpret what these photographs are about in the light of context, knowledge, and appearance. The subject matter of the photograph is not what was in front of the lens when the shutter fell, but rather a contribution of the photographer who used the images to explore a viewpoint on a theme.

You might be interested in this discussion of Thomas Demand's work which picks up on this notion of photgraphs which are about what is not present (though with a further layer of complication in relation to Demand, since what he photographs are carefully constructed trompe l'oeil paper models of reality)

In the room Identity Politics, we looked and at and thought about a range of works, many of which had overt political meanings that we were clearly meant to discern. Others were more open to multiple interpretations. (Frustratingly the Tate Modern website doesn't list any information about the works it is unable to illustrate for copyright reasons, so I can't link to anything useful from that site).

October 30, 2013

These notes are from the second session of the course Playing with Meaning, Tate Modern, (by ticket only, sold out).

We continued discussing questions about the meaning of art works, beginning by looking at some of Arthur C. Danto's ideas. Danto, who died, last week, was famous for his 1964 paper 'The Artworld' in which he suggested that

'To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmopshere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld'

He fleshed this out in his extensive discussions of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes and their significance, and by using a range of thought experiments which demonstrated the non-identity of indiscernibles: most famously in his discussion of 9 apparently identical square canvases painted red - each with different artistic properties, and some not even works of art (e.g. entitled 'Red Square', 'The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea' 'Kierkegaards Mood', and a canvas primed by the artist Giorgione - this last one not a work of art).

An important feature of Danto's account of art was his emphasis that works of art are about something, they have a subject, and a viewpoint on that subject, a viewpoint that they characteristically express in an elliptical way that gives rise to interpretation.

Moving to the topic of Play, we discussed both Bernard Suits' ideas about game-playing, what it is and why it is valuable, as argued in his negelected classic The Grasshopper. For more information about this book, read this review, and this interview with Tom Hurka on Suits on Games

We also considered Freud's essay 'The Creative Writer and Daydreaming' in which he suggested that the opposite of play for a child is not seriousness, but reality; that children are not usually confused about the difference between play and reality, but immerse themselves in play with a seriousness that adults would for the most part feel embarrassed to admit if they did it. The worlds that some creative writers create are analogous to the make believe games of children, and get their power from the wish fulfilment of childhood, and the unconscious forces at play then. Adults disguise the real source of power with the surface delight of aesthetic design. But, Freud suggests, it is the powerful emotional world of the child that fuels both the creator and the reader in their engagement with imaginary worlds. Maria Popova has some extracts and comments on Freud's essay here.

In the Tate Modern gallery we explored some of Paul Klee's playful paintings in the new exhibition Making Visible, some of which are sophisticated doodles in which he takes a line for a walk, others play with abstraction, or experiment playfully with colour. We thought about them both in terms of play and playfulness (his interest in making them, ours in looking at them), and recognizing the range of aesthetic surface pleasures that he used to draw us into the works. In some cases, he deliberately set himself rules, as if playing a game, converting, for example shapes into abstractions in a series of tonally changing moves in his picture of pottery.

We also discussed how the absence of contextual information about particular images in the exhibition made interpretation in terms of artist's intentions very difficult. Knowing whether a work was, for example, the result of a Bauhaus technical exercise, a caricature of a particular person, or a response to a particular situation, would have helped eliminate anachronistic and inappropriate responses.

What does a work of art mean? Possibly nothing at all. Possibly many different things. We all engage in projective interpretation (finding our own meanings in someone else's art) to some extent. But often artists want you to recognize features of their style, content, etc. So does that mean that the artists have the last say on what their work means? The debate is polarised between those who say No (labelled 'anti-intentionalists here) and those who say Yes (Intentionalists). Some philosophers have also suggested that what matters is not actual intentions, but virtual intentions, those which, based on the work and context, might plausibly be attributed to the artist...

Anti-Intentionalists see the principal appropriate activity of an art critic/viewer as scrutiny. That is, the viewer looks to see what is there, is not unduly influenced by art historical detail, facts about the artist's life, the subject matter, and so on. Clive Bell's views in his book Art (1914) are an extreme example. Bell believed that what all art has in common is that it possesses Significant Form. Not all form is significant, but when patterns of lines, shapes and colours (and some depth) combine they can produce an aesthetic emotion in a sensitive viewer. For Bell, we should bring nothing of life to art. All art through ages has achieved its status as art from these formal properties. The emotion they produce, aesthetic emotion, is not characteristic of everyday life. For Bell its power almost certainly came from its potential to put us in touch with the noumenal world (a Kantian term), that is the world of deeper reality that lies behind the veil of everyday appearances and is not usually available to us.

Another famous defence of anti-intentionalism was Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy'. ('Fallacy' in this context is simply an unreliable way of arguing) There they argued that we shouldn't treat the author of a poem as an oracle about its meaning. Rather, readers should focus on the words on the page, and not get embroiled in author psychology. Their main argument was that appeals to authors' intentions were either misleading or unnecessary. If the poem failed to achieve the poet's intentions, then it was misleading to refer to the intentions as the source of its meaning; if the poem did achieve the aims, then appeals to intention were redundant since the meaning was there to be discerned in the poem.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell used a knock-down argument to make the first of these two points:
'...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').

Difficulties with the anti-intentionalist position include the fact that as Ernst Gombrich often pointed out, there is no innocent eye. Also it is hard to appreciate irony if you don't have some access to the artist's or writer's intentions. Extreme anti-intentionalists would say that to appreciate a Rembrandt self-portrait the fact that the artist intended (if he did) to potray himself ageing, is irrelevant to our appreciaton of it as art - this seems wrong. Subject matter has to be part of some art. It also seems a bit perverse not to find out as much as you possibly can about the circumstances in which a work of art was produced.
For more about Clive Bell and why is theory of art fails, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question. Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' is reprinted in my book (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed.

In contrast, intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim, argue that the job of the critic or viewer involves retrieval, retrieval of an artist's intentions, motivations, historical milieu, and so on. Understanding a work of art involves understanding how it came to be as it is. Obviously information is incomplete in many cases, but this does not prevent it from being a worthwhile goal where we do have access to background information. Nor would Wollheim want us to forego spending time looking very closely at the work itself; it is just that the history of how it came to be as it is, its aetiology is important for understanding it.
For more on Intentionalism see Richard Wollheim 'Criticism as Retrieval' supplementary essay in the second ed. of his book Art and Its Objects.

A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor, amongst others, in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally brilliant Yogi Berra - my favourite quotation of his is 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it') is what might be called Virtual Intentionalism. Here the facts don't matter so much about what the artist's actual intentions were. The point is to try to reconstruct what they might reasonably have been. The artist can't overrule your interpretation here.
Fodor's article is in Danto and His Critics.

There is a further issue of whether this sort of discussion of artist’s intentions implies a misleading picture of what it is to do something intentionally. Many writers in this area describe intentions as if artists always had introspectible mental events that are the precursors of and causes of their works. But is this so? What of R.G. Collingwood’s account of art (in his The Principles of Art) where he described the artist as beginning with an inchoate emotion that he or she makes clear to him or herself in the process of producing a work of art. On that picture (which rings true with many artists), the idea that an artist has a clear intention that precedes the creation of the artwork is implausible in most cases.

July 20, 2013

Playing with Meaning

Led by Nigel Warburton author of The Art Question and A Little History of Philosophy.

Works of art have meanings, meanings that are intended, accidental, contextual. Often they play with questions about meaning itself, whether obliquely or overtly. They can also be quirky, playful, humorous, poetic, conceptual. In this six-part course we explore some of the general philosophical questions about art and meaning, as well as specific questions about particular artworks. Each session begins in the East Room at Tate Modern with a combination of a short introductory lecture with discussion in small groups, followed by a visit to the galleries including the Paul Klee and Mira Schendel exhibitions. Topics covered include the role of artistic intentions and context in the creation of meaning, art and daydreaming, the nature of humour, art that alludes to philosophy, and the relationship between the visual and conceptual elements of art. Philosophers whose work is discussed include Richard Wollheim, Arthur Danto and Noël Carroll.

This course is open to all levels and experience of philosophy and art history. Ticket price includes drinks in the Members Room after each session.

Sorry for the delay in posting these notes for sessions 4 and 5. Look out for further courses at Tate Modern or possible Tate Britain.

Session 4

Picking up on the previous week's discussions about power and sexuality in relation to particular images, we began Session 4 by discussing Thomas Nagel's ideas on sexual perversion. His view that 'normal' sexual desire involves escalating reciprocity (in a kind of interaction which gets its power from the individuals' arousal at being found arousing as well as from the arousing caused by the partner) gave a way of thinking about the relationship between artist and subject in some of the more overtly sexual paintings and photographs we had examined the previous week.

It is important to recognise that Nagel was not using 'normal' and 'perversion' as moral terms, but rather as descriptive: just as someone who preferred to eat pictures of food above eating food itself could be said to exhibit a perversion, so someone who engages in forms of sex that lack the recriprocity that he thinks normal may not be doing anything immoral.

In the exhibition A Bigger Splash we looked at a range of images that involved expressive bodily movements in various ways, from the film of Jackson Pollock in action ('I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them'), rhythmically applying paint in his trademark style through to Yayoi Kusama's 1968 hippy film 'Flower Orgy' in which a group of naked young men and women covered in painted spots cavort and squirm together. The film was part of her deliberately provocative protest campaign to stop the Vietnam War on the grounds that human bodies were 'too beautiful to be killed in that way' (see a recent interview with Kusama)

Session 5

For the final session of the course we began by considering some of Erving Goffman's (1922-82) insights about role playing and the self. Goffman, a social psychologist, is famous for giving a dramaturgical account of human interaction - one that takes seriously the idea that 'all the world's a stage'.

People give performances. They act roles to each other, idealized roles that in part embody how they think others want them to behave, sometimes using props to draw attention to their roles. We read non-verbal cues very quickly and accurately. We look for symptoms, the impressions people give off, and we are sensitive to anomalous role playing. For Goffman, in his classic 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
there is no underlying 'true' self, just a series of masks or roles. (There are brief notes on the key features of his work here)

Returning to the Bigger Splash exhibition, we focused on a several images and videos in the room Transformations, including a series of self-portraits by Cindy Sherman. This review of a retrospective of Cindy Sherman's photography draws attention to an important feature of her approach: although she is taking on a series of roles, and implicitly commenting on the expectation of roleplaying for women, she is never so far into the role that she herself is unrecognizable - she combines being in the role with drawing attention to th fact that she is playing a role in a manner akin to the eager student in the front row of a lecture that Jean-Paul Sartre describes who is so intent on giving off the sense of being a good student that it actually interferes with listening. With Sherman's work, there is an uneasy sense that she is both in role and directing our attention to the roleplaying itself. If you are interested in Cindy Sherman, there is a superb online catalogue of her images on the MOMA website here (you can scroll through images from the retrospective and click on individual ones to enlarge them).

There is an interesting video here of Cindy Sherman discussing roleplaying in her self-portraits:

For this session we focussed on human relations, and in particular love and desire, as described by Jean-Paul Sartre. The point of the discussion was to provide an angle on some of Edvard Munch's paintings - a way of exploring the implied human relations between depicted lovers, and also the painter/viewer.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre gives a somewhat bleak description of the nature of human relationships. Although Sartre's existentialism begins from the subjective viewpoint, Sartre is no solipsist - his example of the voyeur looking through a keyhole being transfigured into awareness of himself as a 'looked at look' is intended to demonstrate to us how much through emotions such as shame we are committed to awareness of the existence of others as centres of their own consciousness and corresponding freedom.

Relationships involve a struggle between conscious beings each presenting themselves to the other in a way that they hope will make them attractive, but constantly at risk either of turning the Other into something less than a free individual, or else, in Bad Faith, of becoming fixed as a self for the Other, in a kind of assimilation into the other person, which ultimately is a form of masochism (in death we become prey to the other - perhaps we should say that in love we constantly risk becoming prey to the lover)...or else sadism (when we seek to curb the other's freedom).

According to Sartre, the lover wants his or her facticity to be necessary not contingent: we are thrown into a meaningless existence by chance and there is much about us that we did not choose, yet there is a widespread desire to be more than an absurd empty consciousness that we fill through our commitments. For Sartre the lover wants to take on the role of God according to the Ontological Argument (the argument for the existence of God that makes God's existence necessary - by definition): for the one who loves us, each of us wants the contingent aspects of what we are to seem as if they had to be so - no other individual could take our place. Described in this way, this is a hopeless wish - given that, at least according to Sartre, our existence is in no way necessary.

Sexual desire, for Sartre, is not simply an animal instinct, but is desire for engagement with animated flesh, bodies as conscious. Something as apparently straightforward as a caress, for Sartre, takes us straight to metaphysical reflection and awareness of our own facticity.

Disentangling Sartre's dense account of love and desire in the section 'Concrete Relations with Others' in Being and Nothingness (both terrifyingly abstract and at times disconcertingly concrete) is no easy task - perhaps ultimately it is confused and contradictory. For more straightforward analysis of sexual desire (influenced in both cases by Sartre), try Thomas Nagel's 'Sexual Perversion' in his book Mortal Questions (but remember that 'perversion' isn't a term of moral condemnation for Nagel here) and Roger Scruton's book Sexual Desire (at times idiosyncratic, occasionally moralistic, but nevertheless a serious attempt to make sense of our lived experience in this area - his appendix 'The First Person' gives a clear critique of some of the assumptions of phenomenology, and he summarises and discusses what he calls the 'paradox of lust' - Sartre's view that we both want to engage sexually with flesh incarnated with freedom, yet at the same time want to possess and fix the lover - on pp120-125).

In the gallery we looked at some of the works in Room 2 of Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye exhibition at Tate Modern - paintings which in their implied reading of human relationships and desire resonated with the Sartrean themes we had been discussing.

In this session we focussed on Jean-Paul Sartre's view of the phenomenology of looking at images and of imagining. In his stimulating book The Imaginary, Sartre investigates the experience of experiencing images - ranging from mental images to photographs.

As a phenomenologist, Sartre was very interested in giving an accurate and detailed account of what experience is actually like, what, in this case, it feels like to imagine something that isn't present, or to look at a photograph of a friend. This interrogation of his own experience was at the heart of Sartre's existentialism, and, when successful, is what makes it so appealing (unlike, in my view, the prickly abstractions and re-using of Hegelian and Heideggerian jargon, which make his writing so hard to follow for the uninitiated - and probably for the initiated too). But it would be wrong to see Sartre as obsessed with introspection: for him consciousness is smeared across the world - when we think, we always think about something (this is the special meaning of 'intentionality' in this context - thoughts are intentional means thoughts are always directed at something beyond them), and our consciousness is filled with the world, not with a little internal picture gallery representing the world.

For 17th and 18th century thinkers like Locke and Hume, experience creates images which we somehow view internally. Sartre rejects this model completely. Even when we experience a physical representation, such as a photograph of a friend, our experience isn't straightforwardly of that depiction.

For Sartre, the act of experiencing a depiction is that of animating an analgon (a representation). If I look at a photograph of Pierre, after a while I no longer experience the photograph as a physical object, but am carried beyond the physical object the photograph - my conscious experience isn't of a photograph, but of Pierre, and not just Pierre snapped for 1/100th of a second, but Pierre himself. He is experienced as absent, though.

Another important aspect of Sartre's descriptions of consciousness is the way in which what is not present can be part of our experience. If you go to a café looking for a friend and that friend isn't there, then you perceive the friend's absence, even though there is no physical stimulus corresponding to that.

If you are interested in questions about imagination and mental images, then I recommend Colin McGinn's very readable and stimulating book (which discusses and builds on some of Sartre's ideas) Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning:

In the gallery we looked at Giorgio de Chirico's 'The Uncertainty of the Poet' - as an experiment considering it as a painting that dealt not just with what was depicted, but also with absences, the absence of people in imaginary spaces that look as if they should be inhabited - a source of the uncanny mood of the painting. We also considered two sculptures that, unlike most of the works we examine in this course, were probably directly influenced by existentialist thought: Germaine Richier's 'Diabolo' - which, with its strings tying the figure to the ground, hints strongly at themes of freedom and constraint - and Water (this suggesed questions about the images others project on to women, activity and passivity). Both sculptures, like many of the quintessential existential artist Giacommetti's, are single figures apparently alone - indeed the subjective starting point of the individual forced to make choices in a world without pre-existing values 'condemned to be free' is typically expressed artistically through lone figures. For Sartre we are all alone without excuses - and alone in the sense of 'abandoned' by God (meaning 'God is dead', non-existent)...and in our interactions with others we are frequently on the brink of falling into positions of sadism or masochism - in the words uttered by a character in his play 'N0 Exit': 'Hell is other people'

For other work directly influenced by existentialism and on the cultural impact generally of French existentialism, see this catalogue Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-1955: